sare, vol. 56, issue 2 | 2019

SARE, Vol. 56, Issue 2 | 2019

56 | T e i m o u r i

Love and Desire in Coetzee’s Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians: A Levinasian

Approach

Mahdi Teimouri

Khayyam University, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of presenting a philosophical analysis of two novels, Waiting for the

Barbarians and Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, through a Levinasian ethical perspective. Levinas’s philosophy is

premised on the ethical responsibility of the self for the other. Redefining philosophy as the wisdom of love,

Levinas embarks upon a revisionary approach to re-defining concepts such as love, desire, and responsibility that

dominate and mediate the relationship between the self and the other. These reconfigured terms accommodate

Levinas’s distinctive ethical standpoint, one that is geared towards valorizing the other over the self. The novels

examined in this article similarly manifest a tendency to prioritize the other in its destitution and vulnerability.

My discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians will be built around the relationship between the Magistrate and the

Barbarian girl. I contend that their non-carnal relationship can be interpreted in terms of a transcendental and non-

ontological conception of desire. As such, desire becomes an obsession which cannot be shaken off. Desire of this

kind liberates the self from egoism. In Disgrace I will explore the concept of love as maternity. Lucy’s refusal to

abort her pregnancy reverberates with Levinas’s argument about maternal love as a self-effacing form of devotion.

In both novels the question of the ethical body and its vulnerability will also be examined. The aim is to show

how insatiable desire and maternal love can be manifestations of the ethical responsibility expounded by Levinas.

Keywords: Levinas, ethical responsibility, corporeality, vulnerability, desire, maternal love

Introduction: Coetzee and Alterity

Published to critical acclaim, J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre has been read in terms of its critique and repudiation of

rational thinking. The Swedish Academy premised its choice of Coetzee as the winner of the Nobel Prize in

Literature for 2003 on his portrayal “in innumerable guises […] of the outsider” (Nobel Prize). His attention to

living ethically with difference and alterity (Attwell, “Exclusive Interview”) has predisposed critics to read

Coetzee’s fiction in the light of Levinasian ethical philosophy; Levinas, like Coetzee, is concerned with salvaging

the other from the reign and tyranny of the same. Levinas’s philosophy is not overtly of a militant kind but works

from within to reveal the oppressive foundations and egocentric modus vivendi of the colossal machinery of

Western philosophy. Levinas aims at rewriting philosophy from the standpoint of the other. The core argument

of his philosophy can be summed up as the emphasis on the irreducibility of the other to any categories of thought.

As a result, for him, philosophy is not ‘love of wisdom’ but ‘wisdom of love’. Building on this premise, he then

proceeds to argue that the self is locked in an asymmetrical relationship of responsibility with the other in which



the latter, in its anteriority and exteriority, is beyond the conceptual grasp of the self. Such a non-reciprocal

relationship is a “relation without relation” (Levinas, Totality 80), because it refers to an unprecedented openness

and non-closure. It is a relationship that does not form a whole or end in closure. The point is that Levinas tends

to avoid terms that indicate completion and closure. To this end and to eschew the dialectical inclinations of

Western thought he is caught in a double bind: to use language in a way that conveys meaning by simultaneously

undermining the sense of semantic completion. This approach is comparable to the Derridean idea of keeping

concepts under erasure.

By placing the self in the service of the other, Levinas recounts the way in which the former is divested of

authority as it enters a face-to-face relationship with the other. The encounter with the face of the other pulls the

self out of its cocoon of egotism, interrupting its smug imperturbability and complacency. Prior to this encounter,

the self’s relation to the world is mediated by reason, desire, language, feeling and one’s subjectivity, all of which

appear initially to be adequate and efficient. However, Levinas’s view of ethics as first philosophy necessitates

the reconsideration of these notions in a way that the ethical relationship becomes the raison d'être for them;

ethics is the provenance of human relation to the world. The point is that any of these notions which can serve the

totalizing objectives of the self, when introduced to the ethical framework of Levinas, are invariably refracted to

accommodate the ethical requirements of an asymmetrical relationship. The introduction of this lopsided

asymmetricality is an effective strategy to pre-empt the ultimate subsumption of the other by the same which has

usually been glossed over under the pretext of reciprocity and equality. Another way of countering the

reductionism of Western thought is to point to the inadequacy of its reductive modus operandi by presenting the

other as infinite and transcendental. The titles of his two magnum opuses—Totality and Infinity (1961/1979) and

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974/1991)—clearly substantiate this point. The infinition of ‘infinity’

and the implicit self-effacement of ‘otherwise than being’ allow for the possibility of seeing the relationship

between the self and the other in a radically different light.

Among the concepts that undergo a reconfiguration in Levinasian ethics are love and desire. These two

concepts have already been the subject of philosophical ruminations throughout the trajectory of Western thought

for both resonate with different semantic possibilities. I do not intend to go into details over the multifarious

meanings and associations connected to these terms here as it is beyond the scope of this paper. I will limit myself

to that aspect of Levinas’s ethically-informed conception of desire and love which can help elucidate some of the

complexities of Coetzee’s selected novels. The purpose is to show how Coetzee’s novels under scrutiny here

display affinities with the ethical thought of Levinas.



In Waiting for the Barbarians (henceforth Waiting) Coetzee depicts a Magistrate, an official agent of

Empire, who develops an obsession for a mutilated, unnamed Barbarian girl. Drawing on Levinas’s discussion of

desire, I explore the possibility of mapping the Magistrate’s obsessive attention to the girl that ends not in carnal

satisfaction but the disruption and persecution of the self. My analysis of Disgrace follows a different line of

argument. Here, I am concerned with love as the sacrificial gesture of self-effacement epitomized by the maternal

love of Lucy for the child conceived through rape. The characters in both novels are similar in that they embark

on an initiative that is marked by contingency, uncertainty and irrationality. Thus Coetzee’s novels can be read

against the backdrop of a postmodern ethos. Levinas has also been branded a postmodern philosopher simply

because his version of ethics debunks totalization. By the same extension, Coetzee’s antipathy to totalizing

thought is evidenced in the inscrutable behaviour of his characters that defies logic and rationality. In a familiar

vein, Coetzee’s fiction shows how the other cannot be incorporated into the same. And if such assimilation

happens it is a coercive one accompanied by injustice, violence and rationalization.

Levinasian philosophy speaks of the same inadequacy in systems of thought which ignore the priority of

the ethical relationship for other ways of relating to the other. Respect and responsibility for the other are terms

that fare well with Levinas. Laura Wright observes that what is “extrapolated by Coetzee’s critics from the

perspective of Levinasian philosophy” is that “one can never fully comprehend the other and must respect the

alterity—the insurmountable difference—of the other despite the impossibility of imagined identification with the

other” (93). In the following sections, I use the two key words of desire and love, to initiate an analysis of the two

novels from the standpoint of Levinas to see how these concepts are imbued with a sense of other-orientedness.

Facing and Desiring the Other in Waiting for the Barbarians

Like many of Coetzee’s novels, Waiting concerns the implications of meeting the other. Central to this narrative

is the uncanny relationship that develops between a first dutiful and later dissenting Magistrate and an unknown

Barbarian girl. The story can therefore be divided into the events that lead to the Magistrate’s accidental familiarity

with the Barbarian girl and the aftermath of this relationship. The girl, whose body bears the scars of torture

inflicted upon her during her interrogation, belongs to a throng of displaced Barbarians who have been brought to

the town by the infamous Colonel Joll’s army. As an agent of empire, Joll and his troops have been stationed in

the frontier town to preempt any attack on the imperial territory. Seeing the Barbarian girl’s deplorable conditions,

the Magistrate moves her to his room and lets her work in the kitchen. During this time, he develops an obsession

with the girl’s body and after she retreats to his room, he disrobes her, and engages himself in a soporific ritual of

washing and rubbing her deformed body and maimed feet which culminates not in sex but in a stupor. He is



intrigued by the scars and the marks of torture on her body and is inquisitive to know how she was treated by her

interrogators. Finally, unquenched as his burning desire about the girl’s story is, he decides to return the girl to

her folks. He sets out on a journey accompanied by a few soldiers from the barracks. It is an arduous expedition

as they suffer from cold, hunger and exhaustion. It is during this trip in the middle of nowhere that he consummates

his relationship with the girl. After the girl is delivered to the Barbarians, the Magistrate is arrested by the Third

Bureau guards upon his arrival at the town. He is charged with “treasonously consorting with the enemy” (Waiting

77) and abandoning his post. He is incarcerated in the same room that the girl was originally tortured in and is

later subjected to humiliation, interrogation and torture at the behest of a Warrant Officer named Mandel who, in

the absence of Colonel Joll, is in charge of the barracks and the town. In the end, Colonel Joll returns vanquished

after Mandel and his men desert the town following the famine.

The Magistrate’s relationship with the girl is ambivalent. Her body is both a source of attraction and

repulsion for him. The Magistrate says: “I see myself clutched to this stolid girl, unable to remember what I ever

desired in her, angry with myself for wanting and not wanting her” (46). His behaviour towards the girl is

inexplicably bizarre. He strokes her body but cannot bring himself to enter her. He is at a loss: “I know what to

do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another” (47). The “closed, ponderous […]

[and] beyond comprehension” (58) body of the girl interrupts the fulfilment of his carnal desires. To desire a

woman in the Magistrate’s view means “to enfold her and enter her, to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her

interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for desire to reconstitute itself” (59). This way of

conceiving desire is consonant with the kind of self-interestedness that Levinas identifies in totalitarian thinking

which aims at closing or at satisfying desire. The closure or fulfillment attained thus imparts to the self a sense of

freedom which stems from “the knowing being encountering nothing which, other than with respect to it, could

limit it” (Levinas, Totality 42). The definition of freedom is therefore wrongly construed as contingent on

“maintain[ing] oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an I”

(Totality 46). In Waiting the Magistrate desperately strives to explain his preoccupation with the girl. The

Magistrate considers himself “enslaved” (59) to the Barbarian girl, unable to understand the roots of his obsession

with her.

The appearance of the Barbarian girl in the Magistrate’s life seems to exercise an uncanny influence on

his perception of the world. Before her arrival, the Magistrate is in full command of his life and desires and, by

extension, his body. Getting to know the girl seems to have brought his complacent attitude towards his life, job

and his own body into crisis as he appears to lose mastery over his passions, thoughts and ways of relating to the

world. The girl as ‘the other’ seems to be driving a wedge between him and his desires. The Magistrate’s sense



of freedom arising from his autonomous self is eroded as he experiences moments of unintelligibility. For Levinas

“intelligibility […] is a total adequation of the thinker with what is thought, in the precise sense of a mastery

exercised” (Totality 123). Levinas equates intelligibility with representation and maintains that “Intelligibility, the

very occurrence of representation, is the possibility for the other to be determined by the same without determining

the same, without introducing alterity into it; it is a free exercise of the same. It is the disappearance, within the

same, of the I opposed to the non-I” (Totality 124). The Magistrate experiences these moments of unintelligibility

as he encounters the strange Barbarian girl. The exposure of the self to the other, according to Levinas,

materializes in relation with the face of the other. The other with whom I am not able to form a totality is “the

Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself. […] He [the stranger] escapes my grasp by an essential

dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site” (Totality 39).

The resistance that the self experiences in encountering the face of the other derives its defiant power not

from hostility but, paradoxically, from its helplessness, nakedness and defenselessness which disarm the self and

question the practice of the same. In other words, the power of the other does not lie in its indomitability or

invincibility but in its destitution and nudity expressed by the “epiphany of a face” (Levinas, “Meaning” 95). The

relation between the self and the other is described by Levinas thus: “There is here a relation not with a very great

resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance—ethical resistance”

(Totality 199). The other calls the same into question and this calling into question “by the presence of the Other”

is what Levinas defines as ethics (Totality 43).

Dominic Head (1997) argues that the Magistrate undergoes an ethical awakening as a result of the

encounter with the Barbarian girl. Robert Spencer (2008) similarly argues that “The immediate catalyst for what

the Magistrate later calls ‘a change in my moral being’ is his relationship with a Barbarian girl” (182). Such a

personal awakening makes him find himself implicated in the injustice of Empire:

as the colonizer makes his colony conform to his own template, so does the magistrate’s phallic possession

involve the subjugation of a foreign body to the repetitive pattern of his own (unquestioned) desire. The

Barbarian girl, however, gives him pause for thought: this is a foreign body he cannot immediately

comprehend. (Head 84-85)

The incomprehensibility of the Barbarian girl and the resultant questioning of the desiring self resonates with the

Levinasian argument about the impact of the face (of the other) on the self. Levinas says that “the relationship

with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself and empties me without end” (“Meaning” 94). For

Levinas such an impact is short-lived and transitory because it is quickly overwhelmed by rationality and



consciousness. The face is a trace that eludes thematization in consciousness. While Levinas equates intelligibility

with representation, what breaks free, even momentarily, from such an equation is the face or “the stroke of the

other [which] however short, turns representation upside down” (Der Ven 107). This explains why there are times

when the Magistrate finds it impossible to remember the girl as if his mind balks at or fails in retaining a mental

picture of her. The Magistrate refers repeatedly to the face in his dreams and wakefulness. However hard he tries

in his dreams, he “cannot imagine the face between petals of her peaked hood” (15) and when he succeeds in

catching a glimpse of the face it is “blank and featureless” (52). While the Magistrate is sleeping with his ‘bird-

woman’, he reflects on the face of the Barbarian girl but his efforts to remember her face are largely in vain,

making him conclude that “‘She is incomplete!’” (58).

There is a relation between the face and the body of the girl. Her face, as the Magistrate ponders on it at

different points, is uncannily associated with her body or body parts: “it is not a face at all but another part of the

human body that bulges under the skin” (52) he says initially. Later the association becomes stronger as the face

and the body form a seamless whole: “I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin.

Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without

aperture, without entry” (58). The repeated use of the adjective ‘blank’ is noteworthy. The blankness that was first

attributed to the face permeates the body leaving an abysmal gap: “I can remember the bony hands of the man

who died; I believe I can even, with an effort, recompose his face. But beside him, where the girl should be, there

is a space, a blankness” (65). Unlike the bird-woman who “flutters, pants, cries as she comes to a climax” (58)

the Barbarian girl shows no signs of excitement to his touch and yields no pleasure to him: “With a rush of feeling

I stretch out to touch her hair, her face. There is no answering life. It is like caressing an urn or a ball, something

which is all surface” (67). The face and the body do not yield to the cognitive maneuvers of the Magistrate. The

Barbarian girl cannot be comprehended in the economy of pleasure and representation.1

The face becomes an idea of infinity that withstands inclusion in thought. The way Levinas describes the

face tends to give us the impression that it is an abstraction: “The way in which the other presents himself,

exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (Totality 50; emphasis in original). According to Edith

Wyschogrod, “Levinas reaches for objects which resist incorporation into knowing acts and for experiences which

bypass discourse” (“God and Being” 148). The face in Levinas is imbued with an ethical authority that summons

us to the state of being-for-the-other. The face’s command comes as an “expression” as the face “expresses itself”

(Totality 51; emphasis in original). In Waiting, the face is associated with desire as it becomes interchangeable

with the body. It is no surprise that the elusiveness of the face translates into sexual frustration for the Magistrate.

The deformed body of the Barbarian girl as the ‘doubly other’ problematizes the adequacy of desire for



comprehending alterity. Here the body fails to be subsumed as the object of desire. It transforms into an object of

care. The Barbarian girl’s body is a surface that turns the grasping hand into a caressing hand. Instead of grasping

the body it takes a different direction. “The caressing hand” writes Bauman, “characteristically, remains open,

never tightening into a grip, never ‘getting hold of’; it touches without pressing, it moves obeying the shape of

the caressed body” (Postmodern 92). To grasp something means to control and dominate it in the interest of ‘the

present’. However, in caressing, the tactile movement of the hand follows the topography and contours of the

body.

The ambivalent status of the girl, as she changes from an object of desire to an object of care, creates

confusion. The Magistrate wonders about the nature of his relationship with the girl: “Did I really want to enter

and claim possession of these beautiful creatures?” (62). The Magistrate’s questioning of his intentions and his

association with Empire does not appear to be incongruent. The catalytic presence of the Barbarian girl seems to

have started exerting an influence on the Magistrate. The question is whether this is related to the “ungraspable”

quality of her face. “The face”, explains Lawrence Burns, “is a disturbance of the subject’s egoistic enjoyment”

because it engages the subject in a conversation which disrupts the solitude of the subject’s life (323). Levinas

describes the relation with the other as “[c]onversation, [which] is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation”

(Totality 51). “The face, experienced as epiphany”, according to Wyschogrod, “gives prediscursive meaning to

ethical existence prior to the formation of moral rules” (“God and Being” 148). How can the face trigger ethical

responsibility? Burns, arguing against the dismissal of the face “as an ‘empty abstraction’” (316), elaborates that

“the disturbance” caused by the face can be ethically accounted for: “the face discloses a fundamental injustice

for which the subject has to assume responsibility. In other words, the face expresses the other’s suffering” (323).

In considering the Magistrate, I would like to argue that his being literally in touch with the suffering of

the other in its haptic form puts an end to his prevarication with respect to the suffering and pain of the other. The

trajectory of the Magistrate’s evasion of responsibility for the other follows an almost sense-wise pattern. This

point can even be supported in connection with the notion of desire. It is commonly known that desire grows out

of need. The absence created by need stokes desire. With the fulfillment of need, desire in the Magistrate’s words

retreats and subsides, waiting to reconstitute itself (Waiting 59). For Levinas and his subversive ethical thought,

desire is of a different order and is therefore assigned a different function. Levinas turns the common egoistical

conception of desire on its head and defines the relation between desire and need in terms of an ethical

responsibility. Levinas favours “metaphysical desire” which “tends towards something else entirely, toward the

absolutely other” (Totality 33; emphasis in original). The metaphysical desire is unquenchable because it “links

the I with the idea of infinity. The idea of infinity is a desire” (“Meaning” 97-98). Such a desire is a desire for



goodness that cannot be satisfied because nothing can complete it. It is a desire that causes estrangement in the I,

making it move out of itself to assume an infinite responsibility for the other. For the Magistrate, desire “bring[s]

with it a pathos of distance and separation” (Waiting 62), that is, it is an indifferent desire rooted in the Cartesian

disparity of the subject from the object. Ethical responsibility makes sense in a transcendental order of desire

because “the disparity between my enjoyment and the declaims of the other” renders me “conscious of the

injustice suffered by the other . . . [as] I learn to question why and how I am implicated in the injustice I see”

(Burns 324).

As previously articulated, the Magistrate, from the beginning of the narrative, deliberately ignores or

avoids the suffering of the other. This is an attempt to shield himself from vulnerability. He knows very well that

his sense of comfort is inseparable from the situation of the other: “it is the knowledge of how contingent my

unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings

the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation” (Waiting 30). The Magistrate tries to stay away

from the chamber of torture by absenting himself from it or by pretending not to have heard the screams of the

prisoners (9). Mapping the trajectory of the Magistrate’s dealings with the other, it can be noted that these dealings

begin with the denial of the suffering of the other. This period is followed by the intermediate phase of getting to

know the Barbarian girl, involving sheltering, feeding and experiencing tactile contact with her. It is during this

time that the Magistrate’s sense of complacency and freedom is undermined. He experiences a measure of

alienation from his own desires. In returning the girl to her people, the Magistrate ventures out of his comfort

zone, moving toward the uncharted no-man’s land of the beyond. Stepping outside the borders of Empire is

metaphorically tantamount to the embracing of contingency and uncertainty. It is equal to trespassing the bounds

of the familiar into the unfamiliar. Delivering the girl to her people is a risky expedition. Upon arrival he is charged

with treason, imprisoned and later exposed to torture and humiliation. His ultimate act of self-denial and

denouncing “the empire of pain” happens when he stands up for the captive Barbarians by intercepting the scene

of their punishment, calling attention to their humanity and subsequently, exposing himself to further pain. I agree

with Michela Canepari-Labib’s argument that the Magistrate moves from blindness to sight but I disagree with

her on the way in which he acquires this status. Canepari-Labib asserts that “it is only when he is tortured and

nearly hanged that the Magistrate starts to speak in a more humane language […] [as] he recognizes the absolute

arbitrariness of the words justice and legality” (91). However, I contend that the passage from blindness (lack of

sight in its sensory and intellectual sense) to sight is mediated through a haptic field. By touching and feeling the

scars on the Barbarian girl and later experiencing the pain in his own body he comes to a realization of the



vulnerability of the body which paves the way to ethical responsibility, a point I will return to in the concluding

section of the paper. I turn next to addressing the question of love in Disgrace.

Love, Maternity and the Materialization of Ethical Subjectivity

In Waiting, the transition from desire to care happens through the female body and in Disgrace, the female body

becomes the embodiment of ethical subjectivity. Levinas’s treatment of and approach to the question of the female

body remains a contentious issue in his ethical philosophy. Critics such as Luce Irigaray have objected to the way

Levinas (ab)uses female corporeality.2 Attempts have however been made by some critics to vindicate Levinas’s

apparently crass and biased approach. The point of contention is Levinas’s elucidation of the role of women in

Totality and Infinity, which has raised feminist objections because of what they see as the perpetuation of the

myth of female inferiority. Arguably, Levinas is aware of the stereotypical image of femininity he appropriates

in Totality and Infinity and the role he assigns to women in his ethical paradigm. Thus, in his second major book,

Otherwise than Being, he introduces a redeeming idea of female embodiment in his philosophy of ethics. While

I acknowledge this welter of conflicting opinions regarding Levinas’s treatment of women, my discussion is not

concerned with this. Suffice it to say that the novels under discussion here arguably furnish examples for scholars

to reprobate Levinas’s sexism. Those with this condemnatory attitude might find the Magistrate’s treatment of the

female Barbarian reprehensible as her body becomes, as in my reading, a catalyst for his ethical awakening. In

Disgrace, likewise, Lucy’s body becomes the site of historic negotiation and retribution. In the following section,

drawing on Levinas’s ideas, I will explore the issue of maternal love as the manifestation of the ultimate form of

love in Disgrace.

Lucy, the daughter of David Lurie, a professor of English literature, who has sought shelter in his

daughter’s country smallholding after he is charged with rape allegations, is brutally raped by three black locals.

On the morning of the attack, Lucy and David are visited by three geese which show up on her farm every year.

Later they are attacked by three men. Mythologically speaking, there is a connection between the three geese and

the three thugs. Geese have various symbolic and mythical meanings in different cultures which range from

parenthood to providence and vigilance.3 Ironically, the thugs are messengers of parenthood and maternity. They

are rapists and looters whose visitation brings a change to the world of the Luries.

Commenting on the arrival of the geese, Lucy utters this anticipatory remark: “I feel so lucky to be visited.

To be the one chosen” (Disgrace 88). Levinas makes frequent use of being “chosen” in order to communicate a

sense of unique and unconditional responsibility for the other to the extent of being a hostage: “In the face of the

other man I am inescapably responsible and consequently the unique and chosen one” (Levinas, “Ethics” 84).



Lucy’s pregnancy is a strong indication of Lucy’s embodiment as an ethical subject. Maternity—a condition that

is imposed on Lucy in her utter passivity—in, Levinas’s terms, represents the ultimate manifestation of being-for-

the-other where one is held hostage by and in the service of the other by way of subjection and substitution. Before

offering further explanations of ‘subjection’ and ‘subjectivity’, I stress that for Levinas the relation between the

self and the other is construed as proximity, a notion that refers to a kind of contact which “signifies an immediate

attachment to the Other wherein I am no longer free to move away or sever ties, as though the Other were under

my skin” (Atterton and Calarco 60). Proximity, just like other terms such as obsession, persecution, hostage and

subjection, indicates the absence of volition and will. It suggests the way the self is pre-conceptually and pre-

cognitively affected in the proximity of the other. These terms are unavoidably interconnected to one another. For

example, Levinas argues that the other, in its infinition, overwhelms consciousness, amounting to an obsession

which is tantamount to a kind of persecution (Otherwise 101). Levinas first of all asserts that responsibility means

being “a hostage”. A self without responsibility for the other is devoid of subjectivity, because being-for-the-other

has a constitutive function for the self. Therefore, “subjectivity is being a hostage” (Otherwise 127). Subjectivity

and responsibility in Levinas’s philosophy are thus inseparable. Furthermore, responsibility is not defined in the

synchrony between the self and the other. Because being-for-the-other is always the past of the present of the

other, the self is always late. As such, the existence of the self is a burden for the other, placing the self in a

position of always being in debt to the other. In other words, the self is always already late in responding to the

command of the other. The subjectivity, the one-for-the-other is responsibility for the other “before showing itself

as a said, in the system of synchronism, the linguistic system” (Otherwise 77). Levinas considers subjectivity as

a form of subjection which materializes in proximity: “it is in proximity, which is a relationship and a term that

every commitment is made” (Otherwise 86). In a Lacanian gesture, Levinas reverses the formation of subjectivity,

locating its provenance and origin not in any essence or being of the self but in the otherwise than being.

Levinasian subjectivity is not stasis or stagnation but a process of signification predicated on the outside/the

other/the neighbour. It is inextricably bound up with our being responsible for the other, or with our being-for-

the-other, that is, on substituting self for the other: “substitution”, he says, is “signification” (Otherwise 13). In

Levinas’s terms, substitution is not a change from one substance to another or enclosing oneself in another

identity, nor fusion. Levinas conceives of substitution or “the subjectivity of the subject […] as expiation” which

is “traceable back to the vulnerability of the ego, to […] sensibility” (Otherwise 14).

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas uses the female body and the act of gestation as the metaphorical

description of the ethical relationship between the self and the other. The self lovingly nurtures, nourishes and

protects the other at the cost of itself. Therefore, the uterus during the gestation becomes both literally and



figuratively the hospitable home of the other. For Levinas, maternity represents quintessentially an ethically

responsible situation: “In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for

others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecution itself in which the persecutor

sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor”

(Otherwise 75). Etymologically, as Levinas has noted, the word ‘uterus’ is associated with the concept of

‘mercy’.4 Maternity is thus the manifestation of supreme responsibility.

I believe that Lucy’s resolution to carry the illegitimate child in her womb represents her responsibility

and her non-indifference for the other. Critics have differing views about Lucy’s response to her rape. For

example, Mike Marais (2001) considers Lucy’s silence and passivity on the question of her rape as her

determination to refuse to perpetuate the domination/counter-domination cycle as the only existent and logical

course of action. Marais’s discussion is premised on the desire for ascendancy or the “cycle of domination and

counter-domination” of the Hegelian theory of history “in which individuals who strive to fulfill their need for

recognition are entrapped” (35). For Marais, characters such as Magda from In The Heart of the Country (1977)

and Lucy follow a similar pattern in reacting to the instances of the assertion of power from those who have been

historically marginalized (the black servants and labourers). By rejecting her supplementary role in the Hegelian

dialectics of power and recognition, Lucy accomplishes two things: first, “through her passivity she refuses to

perpetuate the cycle of domination and counter-domination” and second, her “passivity is comparable to the

silence of, say, Michael K and Friday” which “is an index to the otherness” that “cannot be contained” (37).

Marias’s view overlaps with mine because I believe that this cycle is the war of egoisms which insist on their

being. Being makes us blind to our ethical duties to the other. Genuine freedom is generated by way of breaking

free from the being’s insistence on being.

According to Colin Bower (2008) Lucy’s decision to keep the baby “pushes credibility to the limit” (16).

Colin sees Lucy’s would-be colored baby as “the bridge […] between the old and the new, between black and

white, the oppressor and the oppressed” (16). Colin excoriates Coetzee for creating a character who is the

representation of “extreme, unrealistic, and an unlikely option outside of the pages of a work of fiction” (17). I

agree with Colin that Lucy’s refusal to seek legal avenues to get even with the rapist seems irrational. But if we

define rationality as a form of calculative reasoning then decisions made or actions done in the interest of the

other must be deemed to be inevitably irrational. Levinas says that “the aim of being is being itself” but “there is

something more important than my life, that is, the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable

animal” (Levinas, “The Paradox” 172). To put an end to this irrationality one is required to love the other, to

forego the right to self-assertion. The value of this kind of love lies in its asymmetry. It is feeling more responsible



and always one step ahead of the other. Love is asymmetrical generosity in the incomparable relationship of

responsibility. It is love without requital.

Lucy’s refusal to abort her unwanted pregnancy (an experience which becomes all the more horrible

considering her sapphism) and to report the crime highlights her ethical responsibility in a Levinasian sense as

her decision stems from an intersubjective sense of moral responsibility. It also illustrates an interpersonal idea of

justice which is predicated not on a totality such as state-administered justice but rather on temporal exigencies.

Instead of leaving the farm or selling it, she decides to stay under the matrimonial protection of Petrus. She refuses

to prosecute the rapists or carry out an abortion. In other words, she does not resort to rationally endorsed and

socially and legally approved solutions whose purpose is to breed certainty and assurance. Lucy seems to be

proceeding in the opposite direction. To quote Bauman from his discussion on postmodernity, Lucy seems to be

willingly “embracing [contingency] as a welcome destiny” (Intimations xvii). Her acceptance of contingency at

the expense of authoritative procedures is clearly reflected in her idea of justice as well. Lucy is working out her

relationship with the other not by taking recourse to a totality, which in her case is the impersonal law, but by

insisting on her moral responsibility, which precedes the intervention and formation of the state because “moral

drives have a pre-societal origin” (Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 198). Societal organizations elide the

uniqueness of the other in order to facilitate the meting out of justice. Disgrace therefore opens a space for an

irreducible and unique responsibility for the other by contesting the totalizing approaches which advance national

reconciliation through the perfunctory display of justice carried out particularly by the TRC in the context of post-

apartheid South Africa. Lucy’s moral responsibility enjoys an anteriority that precedes the impersonality of the

law of the state. 5

While Lucy can be considered an ethical subject, whose assent to carry the baby brings to the fore her

selflessness, her father, David, is lagging far behind in this respect. The subject of love is raised by him on different

occasions throughout the novel. At one point Lurie avoids characterizing his relationship with others as love,

preferring to call it affection. “Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin” is the way he describes his

relationship with Soraya (Disgrace 2). With Melanie it is “strange love” (Disgrace 25) stoked by the mythological

goddess, Aphrodite. He speaks of managing “love too well” (Disgrace 171) in his visit to Melanie’s family. He

writes a chamber opera about love and death: “a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber

opera” (Disgrace 4). In short, his idea of love is associated with sexual gratification, reciprocation and

exploitation. But his sojourn in Lucy’s smallholding reveals another form of love: love of the land, animals and

the stranger, none of which is dependent on reciprocity and mutual recognition. The process of change in David

begins in the aftermath of the rape. He seems to be on the verge of reconsidering his earlier understanding of love.



His solipsism shows signs of abatement after the humiliating ordeal of being locked in the bathroom and sustaining

burn injuries on his ears and part of the face while his daughter is being raped in another room.

The title of the novel, ‘Disgrace,’ can thus be seen in connection with the practice of the self-interested

kind of love represented by David Lurie. Based on this argument, living disgracefully means relating to ‘the other’

in a self-seeking and self-affirmative way, or at most in a way that ensures reciprocity. In contrast to this view,

grace constitutes gracious giving and gratuitous kindness and care. In Levinas’s words, grace is “something that

one does gratuitously […]. Grace begins there. It is gratuitous, a gratuitous act” (Levinas, “The Paradox” 176).

Lurie’s disgraceful behavior is reflected in his tendency to objectify women. For example, he says that he “was

enriched by the experience” (56) of sleeping with Melanie and has learned something about himself through his

relationship with women which “to that extent they have made [him] a better person” (70). These remarks disclose

a prevalent indifference in Lurie’s attitude toward the other. Lurie’s perspective is also analogous to the way the

French philosopher, Pascal, sees love as concupiscence: “an assuming and an investing by the I. The I think

reconstitutes presence and being, interestedness and immanence, in love” (Levinas, “God” 178; emphasis in

original). For Levinas, love is transcendence which is beyond essence. Lurie’s absurd obsession with the dogs

toward the end of the novel is noteworthy here. Lurie’s Levinasian love materializes in response to the silent,

helpless authority of the dogs. The letters D, O, G comprising ‘dog’ are the word reversal of God and Levinas

maintains that “God is a commandment to love. God is the one who says that one must love the other” (Levinas,

“The Paradox” 177). It is toward the end and in the final scene that Lurie is qualified to use the designation ‘love’

to describe his relationship with the forlorn dog: “He has learned by now, from [Bev], to concentrate all his

attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name:

love” (219).

Conclusion: Susceptible Corporeality

While in the middle of nowhere, en route to delivering the Barbarian girl to her people, the Magistrate, lying in

the tent, reflects thus, on the question of his obsession with the girl: “is it she I want or the traces of a history her

body bears? […] No thought that I think, no articulation, however antonymic, of the origin of my desire seems to

upset me” (81). Then he comes to the conclusion that “perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been

articulated has to be lived through” (81). Just like the geese and their arrival in Disgrace, this statement, in a way,

can serve as an adumbration of the fate of the Magistrate. He is made to ‘live through’ the pain and torture inflicted

on the Barbarian girl first by force and later by consent. Both the Magistrate and Lucy come to a point where they

suffer for the other and the other’s other. In this regard, the path they traverse starts from the ethical and ends in



the political. Put in another way, they negotiate their way from ethics (involving the other) to justice (including

the other’s other) through pain and wounding, which are prices paid for the love for the other. The question that

might be asked is: what is the relationship between corporeality and ethical subjectivity? Or in other words, “why

[…] is the ethical body identified with the body as a sensorium, specifically with tactility as vulnerability, as

susceptibility to pain?” (Wyschogrod, “Towards” 63). As mentioned earlier, the relationship between the other

and the self can be defined in terms of proximity, which as Levinas explains:

is not a simple coexistence and rest, but non-repose itself, restlessness. Not an intentional movement

tending to fulfillment, [but] a hunger, glorious in its insatiable desire, a contact by love and responsibility.

Is love a pleasant, tactile sensation, or a way to still seek him who is nonetheless as close as he can be?

(“Language”120).

Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of sensibility as opposed to cognition in Levinas’s writings.

Sensibility, affectivity or vulnerability “is the capacity to be affected by things […] to be afflicted by them,

susceptible, exposed not only to their sense but to their force, capable of being pained by them” (Lingis xx).

Vulnerability as a corporeal phenomenon is closely associated with tactile sensation. Of all the senses, tactile

encounter is basically other-oriented, simply because, as Wyschogrod elaborates, in seeing and hearing “I do not

know the organs that see and hear, the eyes and ears, but must observe them from the outside as if they were some

else’s organs. But, when my hand is touched, I know that I cannot pretend the hand belongs to another”

(“Towards” 61).

A peculiar characteristic of both the Magistrate and Lucy is their being or becoming sentient through

contact with the other. Lucy’s pregnancy—reminiscent of the condition of the other being under my skin (Atterton

and Calarco 60)—and the Magistrate’s ameliorative ritual of caressing the Barbarian girl’s body allude to the

fragility of the body as a whole. Love and desire in the ethical sense propounded by Levinas can only make sense

through the fragility of the other, which according to Wyschogrod “evokes one’s own capacity for experiencing

pain, for emptying oneself of egoistic orientation” (“Towards” 63). To love means to forego one’s positionality

with respect to the other. Since this kind of love demands self-denial it is intrinsically ethical in Levinas’s terms.

In Disgrace, Lucy’s abnegation of her socially and historically acquired privileges is comparable to entering the

moral space that Bauman, following Levinas, describes as arriving at the moral party of the I and the other:

“disrobed of our social trappings, stripped of status, social distinctions, handicaps, positions or roles […] reduced

to the bare essentiality of our common humanity” (Postmodernity 46). In Waiting, the relationship between the



girl and the Magistrate assumes allegorical dimensions. Their relationship is mediated by a kind of desire whose

features are analogous to Levinas’s conception of it: transcendental and unquenchable. Such desire questions the

self and leads to the development of a politics of empathy according to which the self enters the moral party with

the other without letting it be dissolved in reciprocity. In the end, like Lucy, the Magistrate embraces a broader

and more inclusive view of humanity on the basis of our common vulnerability.

Notes

1. According to Wyschogrod, representation “is related to pure sensibility and […] is also a form of intelligibility. […] Both aspects

are required in representation: without the hyletic dada of sensibility, the represented could not arise, but without the meaning

bestowing acts of consciousness we would be inundated by a field of undifferentiated sensible” (“God and Being” 147).

2. For an insightful discussion of the various interpretations of Levinas’s patriarchal view and language see “From Eros To Maternity:

Love, death, and ‘the feminine’ in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas” by Claire Elise Katz. In this article, Katz covers many of the

major feministic critiques of Levinas.

3. Cirlot writes that geese are connected with destiny, “representing the dangers and fortunes of existence, prior to the return to the

maternal bosom” (120). Ferber analyzing Odyssey cites the scene in which Helen offers an interpretation of Telemachus seeing “a

mountain eagle carrying a white goose from a yard” (88). Helen believes that the omen means “that Odysseus will return home and

take revenge on the suitors” (88).

4. Katz’s article (see Works Cited) refers to the etymological similarity between the biblical term “Rakhamin” meaning “mercy” and

the word “Rekhem” meaning “uterus” mentioned by Levinas. I cannot help noticing that in Farsi, the word for mercy and womb or

uterus is the homograph “رحم”, pronounced Rahem meaning uterus and Rahm meaning mercy.

5. In a recent article entitled “Nationhood and Justice in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”, I have explored the ethical implications of Lucy’s

nonconventional reaction to her rape in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on Homi Bhabha and Levinas, I attempted

to show that Lucy’s unorthodox perspective resonates with Bhabha’s performative view of nation and Levinas’s ethical justice.

Works Cited

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Attwell, David. “An Exclusive Interview with J.M.Coetzee.” 2003-12-08, https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-

exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee. Accessed on 25, July, 2019.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. Routledge, 1992.

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---. Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell, 1993.

---. Postmodernity and its Discontents. Polity Press, 1997.

Bower, Colin. “JM Coetzee: Literary Con Artist and Poseur.” Scrutiny2, vol.8, no.2, 2003, pp. 3-23.

https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee

https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee



Burns, Lawrence. “Identifying Concrete Ethical Demands in the Face of the Abstract Other: Emmanuel Levinas’

Pragmatic Ethics.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol.34, no.3, 2008, pp. 315-335.

Canepari-Labib, Michela. Old Myths – Modern Empires: Power, Language and Identity in J.M. Coetzee’s Work.

Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, 2005.

Cirlot, J.E. A Dictionary of Symbols. Translated by Jack Sage, Routledge, 1971.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Penguin Books, 1980/1999.

---. Disgrace. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.

Der Ven, Naud Van. The Shame of Reason in Organizational Change: A Levinasian Perspective. Translated by

David Bevan, Springer, 2011.

Ferber, Michael. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge UP, 2007.

Head, Dominic. J.M.Coetzee. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Katz, Claire Elise. “From Eros to Maternity: Love, Death, and ‘the Feminine’ in the Philosophy of Emmanuel

Levinas.” Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol.3, edited by C.E. Katz,

Routledge, 2005, pp. 190-212.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics as First Philosophy.” The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, Basil Blackwell,

1989, pp. 77-88.

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Lingis, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, pp. 109-127.

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Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, pp. 75-102.

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1974/1991.

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edited by Robert Bernasconi and D. Wood, Routledge, 1988, pp. 168-80.

---.Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Kluwer Academic Publishers,

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Lingis, Alphonso. Introduction. Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Alfonso

Lingis, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, pp. vii-xxxi.



Marais, Mike. “Very Morbid Phenomena: ‘Liberal Funk’, the ‘Lucy-Syndrome’ and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.”

Scrutiny2, vol.6, no.1, 2001, pp. 32-38.

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11, no. 2, 2019, pp. 345-362.

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Wright. Laura. “‘Does He Have It in Him to Be the Woman?’ The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee‘s

Disgrace.” Ariel, vol.37, no.4, 2006, pp. 83-102.

Wyschogrod, Edith. “God and ‘Being’s Move’ in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Journal of Religion,

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---. “Towards a Postmodern Ethics: Corporeality and Alterity.” The Ethical, edited by Wyschogrod and Gerald P.

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